Accountability & repair

Repentance Is More Than Feeling Bad

By Dr. Donetta D. Quinones, PhD, LMHC, LPC  ·  6 min read

Crowds come out to the Jordan to be baptized, and John tells them to bring forth fruits worthy of repentance. And the crowd asks him the only sensible follow-up question in the Bible:

“What shall we do then?”

And he answers. Three times, to three different groups, with startling specificity.

• To the crowds: whoever has two coats, share with the one who has none; and whoever has food, do the same.
• To the tax collectors: collect no more than you are authorized to collect.
• To the soldiers: do violence to no one, accuse no one falsely, and be content with your wages.

Notice what he does not do

He does not tell them to feel worse. He does not describe an inner state, or ask anyone to examine their heart, or set a threshold of remorse that has to be reached first.

He does not even tell the tax collectors or the soldiers to quit. He addresses them exactly where they stand and names the specific temptation that attaches to each role — the tax farmer’s surcharge; the soldier’s shakedown, false accusation, and grievance about pay.

Each group is given a thing to stop doing that their neighbors could verify by Friday.

That is the standard, and it is considerably higher than the one most of us have been operating with.

What the words carry

Two words sit under the biblical picture, and both get mishandled.

The Hebrew shuv is a movement word — to turn, to return, to come back the way you came. It is the verb of a person who has gone in a direction and reverses.

The Greek metanoia is usually glossed as repentance, turning about, conversion. You will often hear it preached as “a change of mind,” on the grounds that its parts mean after and mind. That is a fair note about the word’s classical history. It is not a safe way to define what the New Testament does with it — compound words routinely mean more or less than their pieces, and every New Testament use of metanoia sits next to a demand for something visible. John pairs it with fruit. Paul, before Agrippa, describes his own message as telling people to repent and turn to God and do works worthy of repentance.

Why this matters in a family rather than a sermon

Because “he was really sorry” is the sentence that ends most family conversations about harm, and it is not information.

Sorrow is real and it is not nothing. It is also the easiest thing in the sequence to produce, the hardest to verify, and — for anyone who has been hurt repeatedly by the same person — the least predictive. A person can be genuinely devastated on Tuesday and unchanged by Friday, and mean every word of the devastation.

The tax collectors were not asked how they felt about the surcharge. They were told to stop charging it.

What John’s answers have in common is that each one is specific, behavioral, in the present tense, and observable by someone other than the person doing it. Those four properties are the whole test, and they are as usable at a kitchen table as at a river.

The question to ask instead

Not are you sorry? — which invites a performance nobody can grade.

Ask: what will be different, by when, that I would be able to notice without being told?

The answer separates two things that sound identical in the moment. A person who has actually turned generally has an answer, sometimes a halting one, and it names a behavior. A person who has only felt something will usually answer with a further description of their feelings, or with an account of how hard this has been for them — and will experience the question itself as an insult, which is worth noticing rather than apologizing for.

None of this is about withholding grace. Grace is not the thing being rationed here; it was never contingent on the answer. What is being asked is a much smaller question, about what to expect on Friday.